A Quote by Michael Emerson
I have to conclude, oh, the best people are all somebody other than my own race. So that's difficult. How do we interpret the Bible? Should we stress things like justice and that God is somebody who cares about equality of all people? Or is he a God of love and a God who's there to give me an afterlife?
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If I'm a blessing to you, then either God will put it on your heart to bless me, or he'll use somebody else to bless me. If I'm friendly with you, then I'll have friends. If I'm merciful with people, the Bible says I'll get mercy back. If I'm not judgmental, then people won't be judgmental with me. And it works also with finances. If you give to help other hurting people and you give to the preaching of the gospel, because you love God, then God takes care of you.
People interpret things through their owns lens, just the way they do the Bible. You can find justification for just about everything in the Bible. I think man has got a great ego when it comes to his God, whatever that is. It just seems to me that someone who wants to take on God's punishment, it just seems a huge egoism to think that he should appoint himself to take care of God's punishments.
After 9/11, there were a lot of things being said about how the God of Islam and the God of the Christian faith were one and the same, but that's simply not true ... The God that I worship does not require me to kill other people. The God that I worship tells me I am to love my enemy, to give him food when he's hungry and water when he's thirsty.
Love is universal. You don't have to tell somebody that loving is better than hating. You don't have to believe in God to know that stealing is bad. All of God's children and their different faiths help to realize the immensity of God. No faith contains the whole truth about God. And certainly Christians don't have a corner on God. All of us belong to God.
The God of the Bible is the God of liberation rather than oppression; a God of justice rather than injustice; a God of freedom and humanity rather than enslavement and subservience; a God of love, righteousness and community rather than hatred, self-interest and exploitation.
Such debates [about the nature of Scripture], in my view, distract attention from the real point of what the Bible is there for. Squabbling over particular definitions of the qualities of the Bible is like a married couple squabbling over which of them loves the children more, when they should be getting on with bringing them up and setting them a good example. The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.
Jesus says God is love. I would like to change it. I would like to say love is God. When you say God is love, love is only one of the qualities of God; he may have other qualities: wisdom, justice, etcetera. To me, love is God; godliness is only one of the qualities of love. There is no other God than the fragrance of love. But the fragrance can arise only in deep meditation.
Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.
You
cannot assume that somebody can define you. You cannot
assume that the other person is right. No matter how they
say it to you, no matter with how much force they say, ‘Oh
my god, you’ll never make it; oh my god, you’re not bright;
you could never do this’—that’s one person. I can’t tell you
how many people told me I would never be an actor.
God's unconditional love is a very difficult concept for people to accept because, in the world, there's always payment for everything we receive. It's just how things work here. But God is not like people!
The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.
The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else's cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God - if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That's what I think.
For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God's lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God's concern for justice permeated every part of Israel's life. It should also permeate our lives.
At the end of the day, everything is God's plan, and he cares about what we do. He cares about our hearts, how we play the game, and how we treat people. He's definitely involved with how we handle sports and not just the outcome of it. I'm proud when athletes mention God in any way.
Giving is better than receiving, 'cause that's the ability you give somebody to get stronger than they would be, than they could be, than they should be, before you loved them. When you give somebody the ability to feel your love and your healing, you're a doctor in the spirit, bringin' medicine from God to your heart and on to them.
"I was just like a pathological liar when I was a kid. I think I just wanted to one-up somebody. Somebody would be like, 'Oh, God, my legs hurt.' I'd be like, 'Your legs hurt? I'm getting mine amputated next week.' And that's actually how my mother found out. She came to school and somebody was like, 'God, that's such a shame about Jennifer's legs.' She made me purge. I had to spill out all of my lies. I was like, 'I said that Dad drove a barge, and we were millionaires, and you were pregnant, I had to get my legs amputated, and I spayed cats and dogs on the weekends.' Now I can't lie.
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